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In announcing his return to the gaming industry, Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts said he wanted his ambitious Star Citizen project to prove that there is "a significant group of people that has always loved space games, and if given a quality one again will be happy to play it." Roberts seems to have proven just that by bringing in a record haul of over $6 million for the game directly from players.

Star Citizen's Kickstarter campaign concluded yesterday after bringing in just over $2.1 million in support. Add in just over $4.2 million raised directly through a concurrent campaign on the Roberts Space Industries site, and the game has attracted over $6.3 million in funding from nearly 90,000 fans.

In an interview earlier this month, Roberts told us that private investors have already invested at least $1 million in Star Citizen's preliminary development and were set to invest significantly more now that the crowdfunding effort has shown there's a devoted audience for the game. The final budget for the game will be at least $10 million, Roberts said, and a larger budget will help support the creation of even more content. That's still low compared to the hundreds of millions spent on the biggest games from major publishers, but it's quite significant for a game with totally independent funding.

Players will continue to be able to lend prerelease support to Star Citizen at prices that are slightly higher than those who pledged so far, but still lower than those who wait for the final release. Backers can still secure a limited number of slots for the alpha and beta versions for the game, which are expected to be available late next year.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

Pretty impressive, I imagine. I still think that the there will be a significant gap between what's promised (i.e. everything) and what ends up being delivered, but time will tell. Hopefully he can manage it all.

I really hope he makes this the way he is intending to - even my girlfriend (not a gamer) wants to play it, once I showed her what he wants to do. Hell, I'd happily pay for and build us both new rigs for this game, if he can pull it off; in fact, I actually believe he will.

That is probably trademarked to whoever owns the Wing Commander IP right now, which is probably not Chris Roberts (even if he came up with it).

On topic: I'm showing restrained excitement for this game. Excitement, because if he delivers on even most of his promises, it'll be an awesome game, and restrained, because he has promised a lot, and I think he might have difficulties delivering (hope not, but still).

Either way, the game should at least look gorgeous, judging by the demo videos he has made so far. Damn, Crytek 3 looks good in space.

Pretty impressive, I imagine. I still think that the there will be a significant gap between what's promised (i.e. everything) and what ends up being delivered, but time will tell. Hopefully he can manage it all.

A lot of these crowd funded games are in the same boat. I think we are just handing them money in hope rather than expectation. However, if the publisher bureaucracy really adds that much overhead and the devs made conservative estimates grounded in experience, then maybe that hope will be answered. Hell its not like it can be worse that some of the rehashed junk were are getting from the big publishers today.

I'm excited about the flexibility that this game promises to offer. Single player, online, offline, locally-hosted games...

The mere idea of having a community-installable and runnable server is really, really exciting. Instead of having to trust your data and your moderation to some big faceless MMORPG corporation, you could actually install this on your own server and then administer it and build a game-oriented community in a persistent world. That, to me, is really exciting.

On topic: I'm showing restrained excitement for this game. Excitement, because if he delivers on even most of his promises, it'll be an awesome game, and restrained, because he has promised a lot, and I think he might have difficulties delivering (hope not, but still).

This is where im at, and why i didnt donate.

One one hand, im hoping for Freelancer, with EVE Online's community, development and amazingness. If that happens i might never leave my house again.

On the other hand... hes promised a lot, and this is a guy that fell into obscurity, come out and makes all the grandiose claims and promises. He doesn't have a major studio behind him(Not that that really matters, look at CCP and EVE). Theres -a lot- more to making a game like this work that isnt simply making the game. Servers, a place for them and everything else that goes into the back end.

But despite my... negativity... I am really hoping this works out, cause this is what gaming really needs. Ive been itching for a good space sim. :OD

I am such a Wing Commander nerd, I gave Chris Roberts and Star Citizen all teh spare money I had for the next month.

Of course that means I now have a fleet of combat capable spacecraft including two heavy bombers, an alien fighter and... well just lots of stuff.

I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm really looking forward to the open-ness of the game, and being able to actually develop my own starships.

Come on, what kid with an interest in Science didn't want to do the same damn thing. Since Blue Origin, SpaceX and all the others really don't want a guy with a degree in Engineeing Physics designing space craft, I figure this is as good as its going to get for me.

Eve just never did it for me. Too much work, too many political parties in game and really hard (from what I played) for a single player to get into the game and do well.

We all know what happens if Disney remakes them. No one will die. Lasers and blaster bolts will be Nerf and Jar Jar Binks will be your co-pilot.

Thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep my fond memories of X-Wing and Tie Fighter and many late nights getting to set up networks to work just right to play the game all weekend.

God bless Tie Fighter. I used to spend hours slaving over missions trying to see if there were any "Secret Mission Objectives" in addition to the bonus misison objectives. My favorite bit is when Vice Admiral Thrawn saves your behind from your trecherous commander.

We all know what happens if Disney remakes them. No one will die. Lasers and blaster bolts will be Nerf and Jar Jar Binks will be your co-pilot.

Thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep my fond memories of X-Wing and Tie Fighter and many late nights getting to set up networks to work just right to play the game all weekend.

God bless Tie Fighter. I used to spend hours slaving over missions trying to see if there were any "Secret Mission Objectives" in addition to the bonus misison objectives. My favorite bit is when Vice Admiral Thrawn saves your behind from your trecherous commander.

Disney owns Dimension who makes bloody horror films. Disney owned Miramax who made From Dusk to Dawn and all the Tarantino movies. What Disney releases under the Disney name has to fit Disney standards. Disney projects released under Marvel have to hit Marvel standards. Pixar projects have to hit Pixar standards.

Disney said that not a single job title or function will change at Lucasfilm. They're letting Lucasfilm continue to operate just as they did before the buy-out.

I'm excited to see the Star Citizen game too, even though I never played Wing Commander :-(

I liked the Wing Commander games (particularly Privateer), but I liked Quest for Glory even more, so I'm really glad Hero-U was successfully funded (and that they're supporting Linux).

I'm curious to see how Star Citizen turns out, but I've had bad experiences with over-ambitious space sims in the past (I'm a [not so] proud owner of the original release of Battlecruiser 3000AD v1.0), so I'm being a bit more cautious on that one. I would have contributed a bit if there was any doubt of them hitting their funding goal, but it didn't seem necessary, so I bumped up my Hero-U contribution instead.

We all know what happens if Disney remakes them. No one will die. Lasers and blaster bolts will be Nerf and Jar Jar Binks will be your co-pilot.

Thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep my fond memories of X-Wing and Tie Fighter and many late nights getting to set up networks to work just right to play the game all weekend.

God bless Tie Fighter. I used to spend hours slaving over missions trying to see if there were any "Secret Mission Objectives" in addition to the bonus misison objectives. My favorite bit is when Vice Admiral Thrawn saves your behind from your trecherous commander.

Disney owns Dimension who makes bloody horror films. Disney owned Miramax who made From Dusk to Dawn and all the Tarantino movies. What Disney releases under the Disney name has to fit Disney standards. Disney projects released under Marvel have to hit Marvel standards. Pixar projects have to hit Pixar standards.

Disney said that not a single job title or function will change at Lucasfilm. They're letting Lucasfilm continue to operate just as they did before the buy-out.

Even if he's pulling a Peter Molyneux and needs to massively scale back his ambitions, it'll still probably end up being a fun space combat game. Seems like a win regardless.

He has made several games before, and has delivered on his promises in the past (unlike Molyneux).

People questioned whether or not he can deliver his promises from a graphics perspective, and he has pointed out that space sims have fewer models, so each model can be that much nicer. He is also targeting high-end PCs.

From a feature perspective, it appears they've already been working on this for a while, $10 million is a decent budget for game development, and he is planning another 2 years of development. It isn't that unrealistic.

I wish Chris Roberts the best of luck and am excited to see high quality space sims making a comeback. However, I wish he'd placed a stronger emphasis on making Star Citizen a cross-platform game with graphics that scale very well. It's all well and good to target $400+ GPUs and Windows, but it's better to design the game so that it can also be played on Linux and OS X and with less high end GPUs.

The game sounds great, but promising the moon set off alarm bells for me. And considering how long I'd have to wait for delivery I figured I'd just save my money. Any extra cost I incur for buying and not backing I'll consider punishment for losing my wager.

I love space sim type games, but for whatever reason, the Wing Commander series just never hooked me. I tried, I really did, but I just could never get excited about playing through them. The only one of his games I enjoyed was Strike Commander.

I've no idea why, and it doesn't really make sense to me either. I wish him the best and am heartened to see it doing so well, and I'll probably give it a shot when it is finally released, but for now I'm just watching to see what we end up with.

Best of luck to him, but with a quality pitch like what he made, i would have been surprised if a publisher wouldn't have given him twice as much to work with (at least). Ten million these days is not a huge chunk of change in game development terms, especially on something like that.

Of course, since he wanted publisher free, well...it'll be interesting to see what happens. I am skeptical to say the least, but hope he is able to make an amazing game.

Best of luck to him, but with a quality pitch like what he made, i would have been surprised if a publisher wouldn't have given him twice as much to work with (at least). Ten million these days is not a huge chunk of change in game development terms, especially on something like that.

Of course, since he wanted publisher free, well...it'll be interesting to see what happens. I am skeptical to say the least, but hope he is able to make an amazing game.

Several veteran developers have said if you're not pitching the next Call of Duty, then they're only interested in Facebook or mobile games.

I'm glad KS is helping developers find consumers to get these games made. I'm fine leaving publishers out of the equation.

I also wish he was aiming for more scalable graphics and cross-platform support (I only run Linux on everything). But I figure it'll be in development for another 2 years, so by then the specs won't seem as high-end and who knows what else might happen. Hell, Cryengine 3 could support Linux by then.

I think I'm going to have to upgrade or build new for this one anyway, so worst case scenario I'll just have to suck it up and dual-boot Windows. If I can endure it for anything, it's this. He's already got $120 of my money.

I wish Chris Roberts the best of luck and am excited to see high quality space sims making a comeback. However, I wish he'd placed a stronger emphasis on making Star Citizen a cross-platform game with graphics that scale very well. It's all well and good to target $400+ GPUs and Windows, but it's better to design the game so that it can also be played on Linux and OS X and with less high end GPUs.

(Edited for grammar issues)

Yes and no. I'd rather see a single platform really really good-looking game than one that works on 2-3 platforms and looks mediocre. That really only holds true in this case, but sometimes the shiny adds a lot to the gameplay. Tons of kickstarter games are cross-platform and lower-end graphics, but that takes compromise, which I'd rather not see for this game.

Generally games have multiple texture sizes and means to turn down graphics detail to run on lower-end hardware.

I do hope to see more games support Mac and Linux (as many KS games have). The issue is that SC isn't running on Unity like many of these other games. It is running on CryENGINE 3, which currently doesn't offer Mac or Linux support.